Psychology & Clinical Psychiatry

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Received: January 01, 1970 | Published: ,

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Opinion

Book review

The Thrill of The Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes on by Dawn Eden (2006) W Publishing Group, Nashville, TN, pp. 212.

This is a must book for all 7th graders and beyond.

At such times (after sex) the worst moment was when it was all over. Suddenly, I was jarred back to earth. Then I'd lie back and feel ... bereft ... my partner was still there and if I was really lucky, he'd lie down next to me. Yet, I couldn't help feeling like the spell had been broken. We could nuzzle or giggle, or we could fall asleep in each other's arms, but I knew it was play acting — and so did my partner. We weren't really intimate — it had just been a game. The circus had left town.

Courageously, Dawn Eden tells it like it is. She lived the sexual revolution "sexcretion" as I have defined it. If "pollution" is environment not in tune with the planet, then clearly non-reproductive, non-offspring oriented sexual activity is against the animal kingdom — and that means extramarital sex. Functionally it is a form of excretion giving a sense of "relief', and that is it. If "orgasm" is the goal, then anything goes from either cat or dog to mom or dad — anything will do. Moan squirt/squeal-slime is like discarding oil in your back yard. The impact on the species becomes more clear as time goes on also: Extramarital sex is a form of euthanasia, and non-traditional "family" life means "no country."

Chastity is a lifelong discipline, based on the understanding of the nature of sexual intimacy — what sex is and what it is for. Whether you practice chastity as a single woman (when it entails refraining from sex) or as a married woman (when it entails love and responsibility), it bears the same spiritual fruit...If you come away from this book with only one message, let it be this: Through chastity, and only through chastity — can all the graces that are part of being a woman come to a full flower in you. (Pg.124).

She goes further with Dr. Mark Lowery, Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Dallas' definition of charity: "that virtue by which we are in control of our sexual appetite rather than it being in control of us."

In a larger sense, chastity is seen as a sexual nature as part of a 3-way relationship — and, no that isn't what it sounds like. The relationship is between you, your husband — or if you are not married, your future husband — and God. That means if you have sex without one corner of the triangle in place — with a man who isn't your husband, or with your husband, without faith in God — that becomes disconnected from its purpose (pg. 14-15).

This is the story of "the prodigal daughter" — one who was suggestible and gullible enough to believe our erotic press and media tyrants. She caught on. She turned back. She found herself and returned to full real humanity. She found herself once again at one with all the animal kingdom and with all the planet as sexual activity becomes rightly offspring ordered for marriage.

Eden confronts the masturbation issue, forthrightly with illumination.

Masturbation trains one to limit sexual expression because it is all about the orgasm. When it becomes the model that intercourse has to emulate, the result is an orgasm centered view of sex, where one's body and the body of one's partner become mere accessories to genital sensations (pg. 164).

She confirms my description of masturbation in my book Happy Ending (pg. 193-198) as extremely selfish, unsocial, obsessional, constricting, and diminishing the need and desire for sanctified relationships, and a life offering dimension. Eden calls masturbation being "sexually imprisoned." And it makes loneliness worse. Masturbation is habit forming; distracting and interfering with higher function; it is counterproductive to fulfilling relationships; it uses people indiscriminately for desire; it removes desire and need for others; it is not a human act in itself; it is a defect in that it overlooks the other; and missing is no mutual desirability with the unitive dimension of two people responding in concert in a trinitarian fashion, i.e., with God's procreative process.

Eden is a remarkable woman with the honorable courage to write about sexuality so that all young women and young men can read this book and understand what it is like to be a genuine full human being in concert with the planet, mankind and God.